What Do Google Penalise For?

February 5, 2018

Ever since Google grew to take up the majority of the world’s internet traffic, trying to adhere to their rules and regulations and not facing the wrath of their bots has been the primary business of SEO experts. It’s often confusing as to which actions just damage performance and which ones will actually earn you an official Google penalty. Here are the actions that will leave you with a slap on the wrist, or worse – no traffic to your site at all.

Cloaking or redirecting Google bots

Cloaking is the process of showing different content or URLs to search engines and users whereas redirecting the bots but not the users is also a violation of Google’s guidelines which will end up in receiving a penalty. Both processes involve showing certain links and texts only to search engines and showing HTML to the search engines but users seeing only images.

Backlink Manipulation

Google will recognise a pattern of unnatural links designed to cause deception and manipulation with artificial links pointing to a website.

Doorways

Designing multiple doorway pages which are specifically designed to rank in search results but lead back to the same page is seen as spam by Google and will result in a penalty.

Content that’s auto-generated

One of Google’s recent algorithms has been targeted specifically at looking for high-quality and useful content. Any content on a site that’s been auto-generated scraped from elsewhere, copied or placed together with little value or meaning will be flagged up by Google and penalised.

Weak content

As mentioned above, Google’s Panda update was designed to prevent poor-quality content sites from appearing in their search results. Things that will alert them include too many images, not enough copy, keyword stuffing, blank pages and any other technical issues that will negatively affect a user’s experience.

Undeclared adverts

Content listed as blogs, news articles or editorials that contain adverts should be marked as ‘nofollow’ so that they don’t rank, and the advert should be clearly labelled as such. Advertorials that aren’t declared can lead to penalties for the page and any it links to as well.

Site performance

If your site is suffering from serious technical issues, it could lead to it being removed completely by Google. This isn’t a penalty as such but removing your site entirely from search results can have a massive impact on your business. Keeping your site running well and speedy enough for users is paramount. For all your website needs, consider Local SEO services with https://www.elevateuk.com/seo-services/.

incompatibility issues

Your site must be mobile-friendly to satisfy Google’s requirements. Mobile web browsing has now overtaken desktop use, so if a site isn’t up to Google’s mobile-friendly policy, it won’t be getting any search results boosts anytime soon.